I'm a Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, a writer here and there on this and that and strangely, one of the global experts on the metal scandium, one of the rare earths. An odd thing to be but someone does have to be such and in this flavour of our universe I am. I have written for The Times, Daily Telegraph, Express, Independent, City AM, Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer and online for the ASI, IEA, Social Affairs Unit, Spectator, The Guardian, The Register and Techcentralstation. I've also ghosted pieces for several UK politicians in many of the UK papers, including the Daily Sport.

The price of natural gas would need to nearly double for the plant to regain economic viability, according to Goodenough.

“If gas is trading at $1.90 or $2 per million BTU, and coal is trading at $4 per million BTU, a coal plant would need to get enough from its energy bid to recover for a $4 price, and gas is only $2,” he said.

And we also get this chart:

So we seem to see that gas is cheaper than coal. That’s great, so more gas fired plants will run than coal where there is a choice.

But that’s not all there is to it. For gas is also more efficient than coal. That is, for whatever number of BTUs going into a plant we get more electricity out from a gas plant than a coal one:

The current stock of U.S. generation assets is not operating as efficiently as they could be, due largely to operational and economical issues. For example, the existing stock of coal plants is operating well below the efficiency of a new subcritical plant (10,410 versus 9,276 btu/kWh). If efficiency was the goal gas plants should run over coal plants (8,000 vs 10,400 Btu/kWh).

We seem to have 20% greater efficiency from gas plants than we do from coal. And that’s not all we get either. We also get a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions:

The CO2 emissions from Natural Gas Combined Cycle (NGCC) plants are reduced relative to those produced by burning coal given the same power output because of the higher heat content of natural gas, the lower carbon intensity of gas relative to coal, and the higher overall efficiency of the NGCC plant relative to a coal-fired plant (1).

“The average emissions rates in the United States from natural gas-fired generation are: 1135 lbs/MWh (Mega Watt hours) of carbon dioxide, 0.1 lbs/MWh of sulfur dioxide, and 1.7 lbs/MWh of nitrogen oxides. Compared to the average air emissions from coal-fired generation, natural gas produces half as much carbon dioxide, less than a third as much nitrogen oxides, and one percent as much sulphur oxides at the power plant.”

Now we cannot add all of these together, this is obvious, because the lower emissions are already partly accounted for by the greater energy density of the gas which is already reflected in our per BTU price.

However, we can add up the following. The shale gas revolution has lowered, tremendously, the price of natural gas in the US. As it will do any and every where else that people are allowed to drill for it. In the process this will close coal plants as they find that they cannot compete with the pricing of that natural gas. That will lead to a halving, around and about, of emissions from that portion of the electricity system that is still fossil fuel fed.

There is more to it than this as well. Clean gas is an awful lot easier to achieve than clean coal. It’s much, much, easier to strip the C out of CH4 before combustion than it is to collect, cool and compress CO2 from coal after combustion. So a move to gas would be at least a step towards that desired low to no carbon emission electricity generation system. There are energy losses in both cases but gas seems to have lower such as well.

Which leaves us with the real puzzle: just why are the hippies so against shale gas extraction when it’s moving us in the right direction of beating climate change?

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Shifting to natural gas is a great thing, compared to sticking with coal, all other things being equal. But fracking has some potential enivironmental issues which haven’t been fully investigated. And, if a shift to natural gas results in the construction of expensive and lasting infrastructure, it locks the economy into long-term use of fossil fuels, which is not compatible with the large-scale cuts in CO2 emissions that seem necessary to prevent many of the negative environmental effects of CO2 buildup in the atmosphere. So… uncertain immediate environmental effects + fairly certain long-term effects = some doubt that a shift to natural gas is an entirely good thing, especially if that shift means less attention to alternatives that do not involve such short or long-term effects.

Because this was never really about CO2, GHG’s, “globalwarmingclimatechangeclimatedisruption”. This is about dismantling capitalism, free markets, industrialization, our constitutional republic, consumerism, etc.

You assume the hippies, as you term them, just want us off fossil fuels, and would be happy if simply all our power (electricity and motive transportation) came via wind, solar, biofuels.

As a famous objectivist writer once penned (paraphrase), if something defies reason, check your assumptions, one of them is probably off. Your assumption is off.

They figured out in the 1990s that socialism is a tough sell at the polls in the U.S. But they figured out if they can control energy, using pseudo-science that is difficult to prove nulll (can’t prove a negative), they can put the brakes on democracy, capitalism, industrialization, etc.

Anthropogenic “global warming” was the perfect vehicle as it was complex, hard to disprove. Until temperatures quit increasing around 1999 while CO2 continued to increase. That’s when you saw the language shift to “climate change” This also had the brilliant tactical advantage of being able to explain EVERY adverse weather event as the responsibility of human activity. “Global warming” was too hard to believe as an explanation for the record snows in the Sierras, for example. But blizzards caused by “climate change”? Ah, yes, warmer air = greater evaporation = heavier snow = caused by my SUV and your nearest coal-fired power plant.

I wish it were as simple as pure, unadulterated concern for mother earth, humanity, and the planet’s species. It most certainly is not. As you suggest, by geological standards, earth is CO2 deprived at 395 ppm in the atmosphere, and virtually all plants are loving life at these levels. Below 250 ppm, life as we know it may not be able to exist due to photosynthesis impacts.

Meanwhile, we now have our first two sets of confirmed deaths from “climate change”. Not from rising sea levels, rapid spread of vector borne disease, or more frequent/severe hurricanes (sorry, 2,300+ days on the latter, a US record shattered in Dec. 2011).

Nope. These deaths were caused by the policies the hippies advance as the prevention/cure for sea level rise, spread of disease, and cyclones.

Wake up, world. Future generations will look back at us and wonder with amisement why we were arrogant or stupid enough to believe that our 3.3% annual contribution to a trace gas necessary for life on earth, where 96.7% of the emissions of that gas annually are fully natural, could overwhelm the atmospheric physics at work. Just as we now look back and laugh at the Catholic Church’s jailing/house arrest of Galileo for proving the sun was the center of our universe, not the earth, as the Church taught.

Yeah that’s why desertification in central continental areas in the northern hemisphere continues to expand while we set heat wave records every summer (so obvious even Fox news is stopping its campaign of denial) and have the worst forest fires we’ve seen in 30 years. Write as many walls of text you want, but the truth always reveals you use bullshit for your building material.

Interesting, if somewhat desperate, rhetorical choice to resurrect the cultural divide from the 60’s. Why do Hippies hate shale? I don’t know. But I do know that responsible landowners are appalled by the predatory leasing practices of the gas industry, the flawed cementing technology that’s supposed to protect our aquifers (50% failure rate by the time a well is 15 years old ), the irresponsible drilling practices that have resulted in thousands of environmental violations and millions of dollars in fines in Pennsylvania alone, and the industry’s blatant obstruction of scientific study through the routine use of non-disclosure settlements to muzzle people whose health and property have been damaged by the industry’s unsafe and irresponsible behavior. You emphasize the shut down of the Cayuga coal plant, but neglect even to mention the study from nearby Cornell that shows that the with the enormous leakage of methane during the extraction and transportation of natural gas, coal burning has even less impact on global warming than natural gas does.

As to the dismantling of capitalism, ask the gas industry why they back “forced pooling,” or “compulsory integration,” as they call it in New York State. The industry gets to choose a square mile spacing unit, lease just 60% of it and then seize the remaining 40%, with out having to pay a leasing fee. This is robber baron capitalism. I prefer the supply and demand type.

You apparently don’t know anything about forced pooling. Companies are still responsible for providing the mineral owner with two and possibly three options. They can offer their own agreement, take a typical contract from nearby leases, or offer the mineral owner working interest. Your argument would be better served by debating whether the extraction of natural resources falls under “eminent domain” per se.

Tim, you know full well why hippies hate the shale gas: because it involves injecting toxic substances along with water into those formations, and if not done properly, will cause those same substances to reach the ground water.

There was once a time when economists from right-of-center were willing to take an objective look at externalities. What happened to you ?

Tim Worstall adds: Here is me looking at the externalities of fracking for shale gas.

You would have to repeal the laws of physics for what you suggest to occur.

EPA head Lisa Jackson admits there has never been even a single case of drinking water contaminated by frac’ing fluid. Ever, anywhere. And btw, in NY State, vertical wells continue to be frac’ed using the SAME CHEMICALS as used in horizontal wells. 70,000 wells, 0 problems.

Since you like to cite John Hanger, I wonder what you make of his statement reported on the CBS Evening News on September 4, 2010: “Spills and leaks have, in fact, contaminated people’s drinking water.” He’s talking about frack chemicals here. In June of that same year he said, ” there’s too many leaks, there’s too many spills, there’s too many incidents of gas migrating.”( Citizen’sVoice.com, June 20, 2010) With regard to the estimate of 70,000 wells, check out http://www.dec.ny.gov/energy/1532.html. That’s the DEC website where they say that they have no idea where or in what condition 40,000 of those wells are. Each one of them, the DEC says, is a potential conduit of gas and toxic fluids to the aquifers and to the surface. It’s difficult to accept a claim that there have been zero problems if the DEC doesn’t even know where the wells are. You also might want to check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKVEAZw2dPw and learn about the water wells that were polluted, homes that were evacuated and dairy herds that were threatened by migrating methane from a drilling operation in Freedom, New York. After checking these things out, will you continue to claim that there have been zero problems?

your Cornell study authored by Howarth has been thoroughly debunked http://johnhanger.blogspot.com/2012/01/howarth-responds-to-cornell-and-other.html Cornell has converted its facilities from coal to natural gas